A Printer Freezes Up, and the Maker Does, Too

IN this episode, the Haggler features more technology that has gone wrong.

Q. In September 2010, I bought a Samsung all-in-one laser printer. It performed well until early 2012, when Samsung changed something in its toner cartridges. The cartridges have the same name and product number, but they no longer work with my printer. I realized this after buying and returning several Samsung-brand toner cartridges, all of which produced paper-feed and other problems.

I called Samsung support, and a rep told me that I could not use the new cartridges, and that, because my printer was beyond the one-year warranty period, a technician would have to come to my office, at my expense, to update the printer's firmware. The charge for that visit, I was told, would probably cost as much as a new printer. In other words, Samsung made a change, without telling me or other customers about the change, that instantly made a relatively new printer obsolete and basically unusable.

Just as a comparison, the printer that was replaced by the Samsung was a Hewlett-Packard laser printer that I bought in 1995 that finally gave up the ghost after 15 years of use and many, many toner cartridges.

This seems like a case of planned obsolescence designed to enrich Samsung, does it not? Jon Showstack

Kentfield, Calif.

A. Let us stipulate at the outset that this is a strange case. The strange part is that Mr. Showstack unquestionably has the problem he describes - as we will later see, Samsung sends out a technician and confirms as much. But if the company actually manufactured lots of cartridges that did not work with printers of such recent vintage, you would expect a lot of noise on the Internet's many complaint Web sites.

Instead, there is a little bit of noise, on sites like CNet. Not exactly an outpouring of rage.

When the Haggler wrote to Samsung, a woman named Rachel Quinlan, who works for the public relations firm Weber Shandwick, sent an e-mail that she said should be attributed to a “spokesperson” for the company. She declined to name that person.

Really? A spokesperson - a person who speaks for a living - who wants to be anonymous? Not only does this sound ridiculous, it also makes Samsung seem tin-eared. Actually, that is unfair to tin, which is far more supple than Samsung is in this circumstance. What consumers and the Haggler want when products break is some sense that human beings are trying to fix them. (Note to corporations: the anonymous spokesman is a dreadful idea.)

“We are sorry to hear of the problem described by Mr. Showstack and have investigated his concerns,” the person wrote. “Samsung printers work with all cartridges except counterfeit or gray market cartridges. To the best of our knowledge, the problem described by Mr. Showstack is an anomaly; and we have received no similar complaints from other customers on the referenced model. We have since spoken to Mr. Showstack and offered a courtesy on-site repair, which he has accepted.”

The part about counterfeit and gray market cartridges strongly implies that the problem here might be Mr. Showstack's reliance on non-Samsung cartridges. But Mr. Showstack sent photographs of the cartridges and the boxes they came in, and they sure look like Samsung's own. The Haggler forwarded those photos to Ms. Quinlan. She did not comment. Nor did the anonymous spokesperson.

As promised, Samsung sent a technician to Mr. Showstack's office. It did not go well. The printer did not work with a new cartridge brought by the technician.

Ms. Quinlan then sent another e-mail from the anonymous spokesperson repeating that Mr. Showstack's issue appeared to be an anomaly. And further: “Nothing indicates that there is a general compatibility problem with this printer model and replacement cartridges. Mr. Showstack has accepted our offer of an exchange unit so that we can bring his printer and cartridge to our labs and conduct tests to investigate the problem.”

The Haggler detects a lawyerly quality to the wording here. By saying that there is no reason to think there is a compatibility problem with this printer model and new cartridges, an obvious question is raised: What about other models?

Further, in trying to look into the problem himself, Mr. Showstack says he heard that Samsung had printed an internal bulletin stating that there is indeed a compatibility problem with the printer and cartridges he's been using.

So the Haggler wrote to Ms. Quinlan: What about other models of Samsung printers? Do they have a compatibility problem? And is it true that Samsung has published an internal bulletin on this subject, suggesting that this is a known problem?

Here is Ms. Quinlan's response, in its entirety: “We have no further information to share.”

Signoffs don't get more Nixonian, do they? A technician did return to Mr. Showstack's office and traded his faulty printer for a new one. The Haggler applauds that move, but was confounded a few days later when Ms. Quinlan wrote to say that Samsung's tests had found that the root of Mr. Showstack's problem was a faulty cartridge. Huh? A bunch of different cartridges had failed, not just one. 

When the Haggler said how nonsensical this explanation was, Ms. Quinlan replied with this: “At this point we have nothing more to share.” 

Less than illuminating, to say the least. But a fitting end to Samsung's ham-handed approach to public relations.

Video of Assange\'s Speech at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London

August 19, 2012, 12:52 pm

By ROBERT MACKEY

BBC News video of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange speaking to supporters from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London on Sunday.

As my colleagues Ravi Somaiya and Marc Santora report, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressed supporters in London on Sunday from a first floor balcony at the Ecuadorean Embassy, where he has been holed up for two months, seeking to avoid extradition to Sweden.

BBC News made video of the complete speech available online and a supporter of Mr. Assange posted a screenshot from Russian television on Twitter showing the rows of British police officers outside the embassy. Britain has promised to arrest Mr. Assange and send him to face questioning in Sweden on allegations of sexual misconduct if he leaves the embassy, even though Ecuador granted him political asylum on Thursday.

Photo of the unbelievable amount of police in front of the Ecuadorian Embassy during Julian #Assange's speech. http://t.co/tHMJlk9o

- M Cetera (@m_cetera) 19 Aug 12

The London bureau of Russia Today, the state-financed satellite news channel that broadcasts Mr. Assange's talk show, posted photographs of the two pages of prepared remarks Mr. Assange held in his hand as he spoke. A more readable form of the full speech text was published on the Web site of the Australian radio station Triple M.

During the address, Mr. Assange varied little from his prepared text, in which he made no mention of the accusations against him in Sweden, but called on the United States to “renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks.” Mr. Assange and his supporters cl aim that the allegations of sexual misconduct leveled against him by two Swedish women are nothing but a ploy to discredit him and make it easier for him to be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial for facilitating the leak of hundreds of thousands of secret military and diplomatic documents and video recordings.

Near the end of his speech, Mr. Assange equated his plight to those of the American Army private, Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing the classified American documents to WikiLeaks, and to political prisoners in Bahrain and Russia.

Casting himself as a victim of a global war on freedom of speech, Mr. Assange invoked the two-year jail terms imposed Friday on members of the Russian protest band Pussy Riot, and noted that Nabeel Rajab, the president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, was sentenced to three years in prison on Thursday (although the WikiLeaks founder incorrectly said that Mr. Rajab's term was punishment “for a tweet.” Mr. Ra jab was sentenced to three one-year terms this week for “inciting” and attending demonstrations; he was previously sentenced to three months in prison for mocking the country's prime minister in a Twitter update.) He concluded by saying: “There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response.”

BBC News also broadcast video of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who is representing Mr. Assange, speaking to reporters outside the embassy on Sunday. Apparently reading a prepared statement, Mr. Garzón said that Mr. Assange “has always fought for truth and justice and has defended human rights and continues to do so. He demands that WikiLeaks and his own rights also be defended.”

BBC News video of the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who now represents Julian Assange, outside Ecuador's embassy in London on Sunday.

A New Wave of Able Robots Is Changing Work

Paul Sakuma/Associated Press

While the many robots in auto factories typically perform only one function, in the new Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., a robot might do up to four: welding, riveting, bonding and installing a component.

DRACHTEN, the Netherlands - At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way.

At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.

One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee break - three shifts a day, 365 days a year.

All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.

This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.

“With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,” said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.

Many industry executives and technology experts say Philips's approach is gaining ground on Apple's. Even as Foxconn, Apple's manufacturer, continues to build new plants and hire thousands of additional workers to make smartphones, it plans to install more than a million robots within a few years to supplement its work force in China.

Foxconn has not disclosed how many workers will be displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry Gou, has publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency: “As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.”

The falling costs and growing sophistication of robots have touched off a renewed debate among economists and technologists over how quickly jobs will be lost. This year, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, made the case for a rapid transformation. “The pace and scale of this encroachment into human skills is relatively recent and has profound economic implications,” they wrote in their book, “Race Against the Machine.”

In their minds, the advent of low-cost automation foretells changes on the scale of the revolution in agricultural technology over the last century, when farming employment in the United States fell from 40 percent of the work force to about 2 percent today. The analogy is not only to the industrialization of agriculture but also to the electrification of manufacturing in the past century, Mr. McAfee argues.

“At what point does the chain saw replace Paul Bunyan?” asked Mike Dennison, an executive at Flextronics, a manufacturer of consumer electronics products that is based in Silicon Valley and is increasingly automating assembly work. “There's always a price point, and we're very close to that point.”

But Bran Ferren, a veteran roboticist and industrial product designer at Applied Minds in Glendale, Calif., argues that there are still steep obstacles that have made the dream of the universal assembly robot elusive. “I had an early naïveté about universal robots that could just do anything,” he said. “You have to have people around anyway. And people are pretty good at figuring out, how do I wiggle the radiator in or slip the hose on? And these things are still hard for robots to do.”

Beyond the technical challenges lies resistance from unionized workers and communities worried about jobs. The ascension of robots may mean fewer jobs are created in this country, even though rising labor and transportation costs in Asia and fears of intellectual property theft are now bringing some work back to the West.

Take the cavernous solar-panel factory run by Flextronics in Milpitas, south of San Francisco. A large banner proudly proclaims “Bringing Jobs & Manufacturing Back to California!” (Right now China makes a large share of the solar panels used in this country and is automating its own industry.)

Yet in the state-of-the-art plant, where the assembly line runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, there are robots everywhere and few human workers. All of the heavy lifting and almost all of the precise work is done by robots that string together solar cells and seal them under glass. The human workers do things like trimming excess material, threading wires and screwing a handful of fasteners into a simple frame for each panel.